I have a fairly large DVD collection. Well, large for me, anyway. A little over 500 titles comprised of about 1500 disks. (A lot of TV series included which contain multiple disks).

I have a number of them ripped and stored on an internal HDD (3TB SATA drive), and all are backed up presently to an external 2TB USB 3.0 drive. I'd like to get the whole collection ripped but I am debating the best way to store them. More external USB drives? A NAS? Or one of the Media Servers I see advertised? I have seen comments in the past about just setting up a separate computer for them, but I don’t think I'm quite ready for that yet.

I would appreciate advice/comments on which storage media you think is best; that is, at a reasonable cost! What's reasonable to me? Currently that equates to hundreds of dollars, not thousands. NAS looks pretty good but most seem geared toward backups and using RAID, which I don’t want to do right now if possible. Of course I may be way off with that thinking. Maybe an enclosure that holds four or so internal drives? My technical level is very high with regard to ripping the DVDs, but about the lower end of intermediate as to what storage option to use and how to properly set them up.

NAS would be advisable when you view your rips in one and the same location, like your house for example. If not, portable hard disks are the way to go.

Don't use RAID unless you have to. The gain in access speed is not that great with using standard (read cheaper) hard disks, although the RAID controller used makes a difference. You get what you pay for when buying a RAID controller (and it's better to buy two, because one will breakl sooner than you think and your data might become inaccessible if you only bought one of those controllers. My guess is that 98% of all people do not have use for RAID in their homes.

For a NAS or enclosure you might consider SSD's instead of SATA hard disks if speed is your thing. Big files that once stored aren't moved around that much anymore by the file system, which means that there is very little writing going on which should keep the read/write wear and tear to a minimum. And access + transfer speeds will be phenomenal. Rip to a normal hard disk and copy the result to SSD would be best.

With a NAS the network between the NAS, the computer(s) and/or TV you have in your place will also be a bottleneck. Especially when there is a WiFi connection in your network somewhere.

Most of the serious mediageek talk seems to think a NAS server coupled with a HTPC is the best combo for large movie collections.

If the goal for the HTPC is primarily to watch or stream media, the free OpenELEC Media Center (which is basically a preconfigured XBMC distro) is the way to go. There is even a version that will run very nicely off a $35 Raspberry Pi, so the HTPC needn't cost much.

For the NAS, it's suggested you go with one of those fairly inexpensive 20-bay media server cases ($300 approx), toss in one of the best and largest power supplies you can afford along with an AMD-based mobo plus a modest CPU, and start populating the bays. You can start with a single large drive, and then add more as money becomes available or things go on sale.

The HTPC handles the heavy lifting maintaining the library list, so film titles can be added willy-nilly without problems.

As long as you're not transcoding you don't need much CPU power for any of this. And if you're not doing PC gaming, you don't really need Windows (or Intel) components either.

Figure below (if you shop around) $1K for the starter NAS with one or two drives, and as little as $50-$70 all in for the HTPC if you go with a Raspberry Pi. Figure another $400-$500 otherwise.

Your biggest worries with a big media server are heat, fan noise, and power consumption. So keep that in mind when planning a media - or really any - server.

what is it you want to do? do you simply want back up copies of the collection, or some sort of HTPC solution, or some sort of networked library, or something else altogether?

the answers to all of these questions may overlap, but the best solution really depends on your end goal (and bear in mind that it's likely to change as you find out what options area available to you )

FWIW I think the RasPi is a great way to approach this - add a hub and some external drives (you probably already have at least one) and you're good to go

what is it you want to do? do you simply want back up copies of the collection, or some sort of HTPC solution, or some sort of networked library, or something else altogether?

the answers to all of these questions may overlap, but the best solution really depends on your end goal (and bear in mind that it's likely to change as you find out what options area available to you )

FWIW I think the RasPi is a great way to approach this - add a hub and some external drives (you probably already have at least one) and you're good to go

Cart before the horse? I thought my post and the thread title were fairly clear: I am looking for storage options for my ripped DVDs.

I figured that I would get replies that address storage options as well as streaming, etc., but my question is really about storage. HDDs or NAS. I have used external HDDs for a long time, but have never used an NAS. Most that I have looked at offer a load of features - many of which I would probably never use. But NAS might still be a better storage depot - I really don’t know at this point.

I currently can watch movies on my TV using a USB flash drive; I have also just started using the Plex channel on my Roku devices which allow streaming from a networked PC. So streaming from a media server is not needed - but if it is easy to set up it would still be worthy of consideration.

But primarily I want to get the rest of my DVDs ripped and am wondering what the best storage media is.

I've just started doing the same; what I ended up getting was a BYOD solution to separate the disk from the platform.

What I got was a Synology DS212J. It also has a USB expansion for great flexibility. Right now I have a 2TB Seagate drive internal to the device, and a 4TB external. I've ripped a good 300 DVDs without making a dent in the space, nor having to fill up the other bay. I still have a good 700 to go, but at least I seem to have the space issue down. I also use it for a file server and an inhouse backup warehouse, mirrored on my s3 account- I didn't think of doing that until later, but since I'd bought a platform rather than just storage, it was an option.

I guess that's going to be what I'd suggest for you... if you're sure that you're only going to want to back up your media and never really play from the device nor use it for some other purpose, then just getting storage space is good enough and less expensive. But if you want to leave your options open, I'd say go with a NAS.

A little confused; I thought that the Synology DS212J was a NAS. Either way, your solution sounds good. I have looked at that product on both Amazon and Newegg more than once. When you say you use a 2TB drive internal to the device and a 4TB drive external, I assume you mean that one is inside the Synology unit and the other connects to it via USB cable?

Also, you must be converting your DVD movies to AVI or MPEG formats. That DVDs I have ripped so far are in the original DVD files format and take up 6 to 7.5GB each! However that format won't play directly on my TV so I am having to convert then again anyway.

The Synology DS212J is a NAS. When I said BYOD- I mean bring your own drives. I didn't like BYOD solutions at first... I thought you were getting ripped off. After all, if you can get a NAS with drives for the same cost, then which one makes more sense? After dealing with a couple of all in one Western Digital and Seagate solutions, I realized that WD and Seagate don't really know how to make NAS software. And if a drive is included, it is assumed the drive will be used, so usually they're locked down.

Synology's OS is top notch. And is basically just a stripped down version of Linux embedded- and with their plugin system, people are writing plugins for all sorts of things, and you don't have to have anything loaded you don't want to.

And then I get a drive, pop it open, drop it in... and it's recognized. And if something goes wrong with the drive, I pop it out, and put another in. And if I don't like that drive company... that's fine too.

Right now I'm ripping to H264 in a MKV container. Everything I have has recognized them fine, and they take up about 3-5 GB each, though some longer movies are up to 7-8GB. On the internal, I have 257 ripped (88% full with 225GB free... but that one is a file server also). On the external I have 79 ripped so far (I slowed down a bit - 10% full with 3.29TB free). My two set top devices also have 1TB in them and probably 20-30 each. I put the movies I most like to watch on one of those to reduce network traffic (my noise movies that I put on when I'm doing something else), and the other that's in the living room holds the movies and DVDs the kids and the wife most like to watch.

And it's just a one step process- throw in the DVD and use MakeMKV.

I did try transcoding from different formats before... but this is simpler. And the difference in fidelity isn't enough that we really care. And without a lot of network throughput and a lot of processing power, you will get skips transcoding.

I have a fairly large DVD collection. Well, large for me, anyway. A little over 500 titles comprised of about 1500 disks. (A lot of TV series included which contain multiple disks).

I have a number of them ripped and stored on an internal HDD (3TB SATA drive), and all are backed up presently to an external 2TB USB 3.0 drive. I'd like to get the whole collection ripped but I am debating the best way to store them. More external USB drives? A NAS? Or one of the Media Servers I see advertised? I have seen comments in the past about just setting up a separate computer for them, but I don’t think I'm quite ready for that yet.

I would appreciate advice/comments on which storage media you think is best; that is, at a reasonable cost! What's reasonable to me? Currently that equates to hundreds of dollars, not thousands. NAS looks pretty good but most seem geared toward backups and using RAID, which I don’t want to do right now if possible. Of course I may be way off with that thinking. Maybe an enclosure that holds four or so internal drives? My technical level is very high with regard to ripping the DVDs, but about the lower end of intermediate as to what storage option to use and how to properly set them up.

I appreciate any help you can offer.

Thanks!

Jim

I might be out of my league here but I'll offer the viewpoint of adding an extra internal drive to your box. As mentioned elsewhere, I did a decent job with a buddy of mine all the way back in 2006 planning a "machine for the future". I have two 1 TB drives already. I don't rip DVD's so that's tremendous even today.

So what I did aka my idea/suggestion was that C Drive was for all the cruft of the OS, installing a hundred programs (and uninstalling 40 of them later, followed by defrags, yay!), misc day -into-month data, etc.

But D Drive has nothing but backups on it, and is solely the backup drive. So I'm presuming that in the event of Some Disaster, you can just pull that drive out and stick it in another machine. So anyway, I don't see why it's so important to have the drives External. I like being able to just select the drive as part of the system, and one day X years from now when C Drive finally croaks, D has got to be in better shape and can just travel somewhere. Or at least the info can be pulled from it or something.